Shakespearean Sonnet

Each of our senses, a way we perceive
The tangible world, the revelation
That opens our eyes, so we may conceive
The boundless expanses of creation

Within boxes to capture reality
With origins in a chamber gone dark
Erasure of dimensionality
New surreal journeys for them to embark

In small panels, the real world converted
Killed by premature solarization
The rainbow flipped, the bright sun inverted
Truth reflected, but all things’ negation

Little rectangles with a chemical shield
In tenebrous rooms, the truth they yield

On writing Sonnet 1

The goal was to write a Shakespearean sonnet: three quatrains and a final couplet, with exactly 10 syllables per line. Here I look at a particular type of creation –creating photographs. The “boxes” refer to cameras, and “origins in a chamber gone dark” refers to the very first form of photography, camera obscura, which means “darkened chamber.” “Erasure of dimensionality” means that everything on a photo is reduced to a flat, one-dimensional plane.

“New surreal journeys for them to embark” refers to artists, who panicked when photography came about. They wondered, What good is art, when cameras can capture reality far more accurately and realistically than art? Then artists realized that photography was good for capturing reality as it is, but art is good for creating reality, because cameras can’t capture what doesn’t exist.

The “small panels” are photographic negatives. Solarization refers to how negatives are ruined if exposed to light prematurely. Flipped rainbows, inverted sun and truth being reflected but negated points out that everything on a negative really exists, but that the color is inverted.

The last part refers to the negatives – after being fixed in chemicals, the image is seen. Tenebrous means dark or gloomy, and the line means that in the darkroom, the negatives are processed into photographic prints, revealing everything’s actual colors.